We (Penny Tompkins and James Lawley) established a supervision group in January
1997 for facilitators using Clean Language and David Grove's Metaphor Therapy. In 2001 we
changed the scope of the group to a regular forum for the
exploration of new ideas in the field. We also changed the name to The Developing Group.

Our aim is to provide a setting where, within a clean approach:

leading-edge thinking can be applied in practical ways

we can go into greater depth on specific aspects related to Symbolic Modelling and other clean approaches

participants can develop their modelling skills and the ability to work systemically.

All the topics presented at the group are listed below.

The Developing Group is for people who use Symbolic Modelling and David
Grove's Clean Language, Clean Space and Emergent Knowledge processes.
Annual membership of the group is open to those who are personally recommended by a leading member of the Clean community, who have 10+ days training in Symbolic Modelling and who have maintained a
fluency with Clean Language.

The Developing Group is not a training. We present a day on whatever we find interesting and worth researching. Participants do not
know what the topic will be until we send
out an email with background 'notes' a week or two in advance. These notes and the input from the day either form the basis for an article that is subsequently published or they remain a 'work in progress' paper. Click on the links below to go direct to the relevant paper or see the summaries following the table.

* These papers are published in various professional and academic journals.

What's going on when you don't get the kind of answer you expect from the question you ask? From the questioner’s point of view, the shift of frame is a kind of mismatch summed up by the feeling “Huh?”. According to the dictionary ‘Huh’ is used to express confusion, surprise or disbelief. We would add that for a modeller it likely indicates something interesting has just happened.

How do you act from what you know to be true when you haven’t before, or it’s difficult, or you’re frightened of the consequences, or you’re not the kind of person who does? While each person’s process will be individual there seem be a number a characteristics present in most people’s experience.

What is cognitive dissonance? Is it the incompatible cognitions? The unpleasant feelings? The need to reduce those feelings? The action to resolve the conflict? Or all of that? Are cognitive dissonance and creative tension the same or different? Is one a sub-set of the other? If they are different, how are they different? Do they work in conjunction or against one another? And what effect does that have?

These notes: - Describe a Clean Space 'Lite' version that contains only the central elements. - Identify the main choices available to a facilitator within the Lite version.- Note some of the ways facilitators have found to respond to the unusual.- Document some of the common add-ons in the feature-rich versions practiced by experienced facilitators.

Embodied Schema are
multi-sensory experiential patterns acquired pre-verbally which later
are used to both describe and proscribe our personal perspectives of how the
world works. They are so natural to us, like a fish
trying to describe water, we seldom notice them.

Those who cleanly model embodied schema from the words and nonverbals that represent how a person internally does what they describe, are privileged to join that person in their private, interior, subjective world. Modelling embodied scema will give you something like 'second sight' into the organisation of others' psychescapes. That in turn will lead to the more precise use of Clean Language.

What happens when people say they
accept, and when they actually do accept the ‘current
reality’ of their lives. We investigate what acceptance is, how we do it, and how we do not.
We also wonder what difference it makes to the potential for change
and transformation when people truly accept their current reality
from an authentic, deep and cellular state of being.

We have been self-modelling what we pay attention to in
a client session that: (1) guides our line of questioning, and (2)
gives the session its sense of directional flow. We call this process: Attending to (or selecting for / sorting for) salience (significance / importance / relevance / what is fundamental). These notes explore the nature of that process.

This paper presents a model that ‘joins up’ the three main
phases of David Grove's work. Rather than trying to
integrate the phases into a single process I have maintained the individuality of each domain and language model. I used the metaphor of
‘join up’ because David was inspired by The Horse Whisper, Monty Roberts.

Whatever happens during a session, excellent facilitators and therapists always seem to know where to go next. They are also able to pursue a line of questioning and to navigate elegantly through the client’s information. To find out how they do this we undertook a modelling project. Our exemplars were David Grove, Steve De Shazer, Robert Dilts, Steve Andreas (and ourselves).